HIST394 - CHINA AND THE WORLD: MODERN TIMES

Description:

History 394 is a comprehensive introduction to the last hundred years of
China's relations with the world, with emphasis on American-Chinese relations,
but within the necessary context of China's relations with other countries
from Asia to Europe to Africa and elsewhere (as well as Washington's changing
relations with Beijing). China's role in the world can be understood only
when the full background and international context is made clear. This course
has no prerequisites: freshmen and others lacking background will find it
manageable and interesting. Students who have successfully completed this
course will be well positioned to understand some of the most important of
current events, and if they like, pursue the topics as careers (there will be
no shortage, I assure you). Although much will be said about diplomacy, and Chinese diplomatic strategy in
particular, the mile-posts of the course will be a series of wars: World War I
and its effects on China; the heroic Chinese war of resistance against Japan
(1937-1945) in which, effectively without allies, the Chinese avoided defeat;
the bitter Civil War that followed almost immediately (1946-1949) and brought
Mao Zedong and his Communists to power while the predecessor Nationalist
government fled to the island of Taiwan; then the Korean War (1950-1953) and
the close Chinese-Soviet alliance that followed; The Taiwan Straits Crises
(1954-1955, 1958, 1996); the Chinese-Indian war (1962) the origin of a
situation now heating up; the Sino-Soviet border conflicts (1969); the Vietnam
War (1955-1975) which changed the United States profoundly while reorientating
China internationally; the (at the time) little noticed Chinese invasion of
Vietnam (1979) - and finally the increasingly tense situation today, between
Chine and India, and China and her maritime neighbors from Japan to Indonesia,
many U.S. allies.